We have made some huge changes in our prioritization and planning process this year. In a nutshell, we have switched to open allocation. Here is the story.

Old way: boards, feature ranking, top-down approach

During the last several years we used to have a Product Board. This was a committee that focused on annual product plans. It consisted of up to a dozen people with various roles from sales to developers. We discussed our product strategy and set high-level goals (like "increase the market share at the enterprise market"). We created a ranking model that we used to prioritize features and create roadmaps:

It kinda worked, but at some point I understood that somehow we pushed more and more features into Targetprocess, making it even more complex and heavy. Many people inside the company were not happy with this direction and they did not believe in it. Large customers demanded complex features like more flexible teams management, people allocation, an advanced QA area, etc. These are all good features, but we, as a company, somehow lost the feeling of end-user experience. Some simple things like search, navigation, performance, and simplicity were buried under fancy new features. This year, we put an end to that approach.

We want to create a tool that is pleasant to use. A tool that boosts your productivity and is almost invisible. A tool that saves your time. To achieve this goal, we have to go back to the basics. We should fix and polish what we have in Targetprocess already (and we have a lot) and then move forward with care to create new modules and explore new possibilities.

We have disbanded the Product Board, removed feature prioritization, done away with the top-down approach to people/team allocation, and replaced it with a few quite simple rules.

New way: Product Owner, Initiatives, and Sources

The Product Owner sets a very high level strategic theme for the next 1-2 years. Our current theme is very simple to grasp:

This does not mean that we will not add new features. For example, the current email notification mechanism is really outdated, so we are going to replace it and implement in-app notifications. But, most likely, we will not add new major modules into Targetprocess in the near future. Again, we are focusing on existing users and their complaints.

Initiatives

Our people have virtually full freedom to start an Initiative that relates to the strategic theme. An Initiative is a project that has start/end dates, a defined scope and a defined team. It can be as short as 2 weeks with a single person in the team or as large as 3 months with 6-8 people in a team.

There are just three simple rules:

Any person can start an Initiative. The Initiative should be approved by the Product Owner and the Technical Owner (we plan to use this approval mechanism for some time in order to check how the new approach goes). The Initiative should have a deadline defined by the Team.

Any person can join any Initiative.

Any person can leave an Initiative at any time.

Sources and Helpers

ASource is the person who started the Initiative. He or she assembles the team, defines the main problem the Initiatives aims to solve, and is fully responsible for the Initiative's success. The Source can make all final functional decisions, technical decisions, etc. (Remember, Helpers are free to leave the Initiative at any time, so there is a mechanism to control poor leadership).

A Helper is a person who joins an Initiative and is committed to help complete it by the agreed deadline. He or she should focus on the Initiative and make it happen.

The Initiative deadline day is pretty significant. Two things should happen on the deadline day:

The Source makes a company-wide demo. They show the results to the whole company and explain what the team has accomplished.

The Initiative should be live on production.

As you see, freedom meets responsibility here. People are free to start Initiatives and work on almost anything, but they have to meet their deadlines and deliver the defined scope. This creates significant peer pressure, since you don't want to show bad results during the demo.

This process was started in July. We still have a few teams finalizing old features, but the majority of developers are working in the Initiatives mode now. Here's a screenshot of the Initiatives currently in progress:

The Initiatives in the Backlog are just markers; some of them will not go into development, and there is no priority here. Next is the Initiatives Kanban Board:

You may ask, how do we define what is most important? The answer is: it does not matter. If we have a real pain from customers, and we have a few people that really want to solve this problem — it will be solved. Nobody can dictate a roadmap, nobody can set priorities, even the Product Owner. The Product Owner can start their own Initiatives (if they can get enough Helpers) or decline some Initiatives (if it takes tooooo long or doesn't fit the strategic theme).

As a result, we don't have roadmaps at all. We don't discuss priorities. And we can't provide answers to your questions like "when will you have a better Git integration". We can only make promises about things already started (you can see some of them above). All the people inside our company care about making our customers happy with the product, and now they have been enabled with real power to react faster and help you.

We can also promise that Targetprocess will become easier, faster, and more useful with every new release.